


today begins and it’s all that we have

by jonphaedrus



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Gen, Nagamas 2013
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-06 23:56:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1113026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucina realises, as she watches herself grow, that they are very different people, from two very different worlds. As an adult, she’s wide-eyed and happy, kind but with a sharp tongue, and she wields her sword much more reluctantly than Lucina ever had to. There’s something of brightness and life in her eyes, an innocence that Lucina envies terribly, deep in her bones. </p><p>But she doesn’t have a second chance like that, because she’s a woman grown, and she found her innocence and happiness later in life instead of as a child. She doesn’t really mind, she finds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	today begins and it’s all that we have

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [blahblahblahviolentpain](http://blahblahblahviolentpain.tumblr.com/) on tumblr for the Nagamas Secret Santa gift exchange of 2013.

Her memories of her father are a child’s memories, hazy and fragmented. But she remembers what he looked like—a grizzled, greying man, with heavy bruises under his eyes. He had rarely smiled, and when he did, it always looked like it hurt. He had tried to teach her to wield a sword, but never really succeeded. Not with his weak arms, his aching bones and muscles—so badly aged. 

She hadn’t asked about her mother, not after a certain point. When her father’s eyes had started to get tired and empty, she had known what was coming. She had faced it with a sword in her hand and a hole in her heart, but…

The Chrom she meets when she falls through to the past is a very different Chrom. He smiles freely, and there is no grey in his hair yet. He is a healthy, vibrant man in the prime of his life. He fights the same way she used to imagine that he did, when she was a child, hoping that he could rescue them all. She’s in permanent awe.

She wonders, sometimes, if her life could have been different if this man was there, instead of the tired broken-down father she knew better. If her Chrom had slept at night, instead of slowly losing his energy to the demons of insomnia. If he hadn’t been broken by fears and terrors, and remained standing and strong.

They’ll never know, but she can imagine that they will. 

—

He teaches her how to wield a sword. In the past, instead of his half-aborted attempts in her own timeline. Chrom’s hands are warm, but not the same as the hands she remembers. She remembers her father missing one finger on his right hand, with a big scar on his left palm. This Chrom that is hardly any older than she is has no scar on his palm, has all his fingers still attached. He laughs when she swings awkwardly, trying to imitate some move he never carried on in his older years. He corrects her stance, and he feels so much smaller behind her back, adjusting her grip on the hilt of Falchion. He used to feel so large. Miles tall, and so impossibly old. Now he’s young, and simply a normal person.

—

She watches herself, sometimes. When she knows her father isn’t around. As an infant, too early for Lucina to remember her own experiences, she has wide eyes and watches the world pass with the intense gaze of someone too small to experience more than a little bit at once. Lucina wonders what her father was like with her, if he bounced her the same way that he bounces the infant that is-and-is-not-her.

As she grows, the Lucina-that-she-isn’t becomes an inquisitive child. She watches her father carefully, toddles after her mother, and is fascinated by her many aunts and uncles from around the world. Lucina thinks that she takes more after her Aunt Lissa than Lucina ever did, but this newer, younger her has so much less grief hanging on her shoulders than Lucina had to bear. She laughs, and smiles. She tries and fails to wield Falchion, but that’s all right. She doesn’t need to take it up any time soon.

When she’s old enough to understand what goes on around her, when she’s old enough that she’s the same age Lucina was when her father vanished and just never came back, she begins to question things—but, not the things Lucina expects her to question. She remembers questioning everything at that age. Where her mother had gone, why her father always cried, why so few people started coming home, why Falchion was so heavy. Instead, this Lucina asks about why the sky is blue, why Virion can see so far to hit people with his arrows, why nobody likes dragons. She asks all these questions of Lucina, like they’re drawn together.

And, as she grows, Lucina passes on the same things to herself as her father passed onto her. She teaches her how to fight, how to think strategically, how to be a good leader. Even if she doesn’t need it.

Little Lucina never questions why she has an aunt who looks just like her. So much older than her, nearing the same ager her father was when he died, Lucina seems like just another one of her manifold family, spread out far and wide. She never questions why they have the same name.

Lucina realises, as she watches herself grow, that they are very different people, from two very different worlds. As an adult, she’s wide-eyed and happy, kind but with a sharp tongue, and she wields her sword much more reluctantly than Lucina ever had to. There’s something of brightness and life in her eyes, an innocence that Lucina envies terribly, deep in her bones. 

But she doesn’t have a second chance like that, because she’s a woman grown, and she found her innocence and happiness later in life instead of as a child. She doesn’t really mind, she finds.

Perhaps she never knew her father but as a comrade in arms, a partner on the battlefield, a general, a friend. Perhaps over time she finds that as they both grow she stops calling him Father, and begins calling him Chrom—they both understand that any chance they had of being a father and daughter died when he did in her own timeline. She stops thinking of this young woman who knows more of court than she does of battle as herself, but as simply a friend’s daughter. She goes on to do what she wants, what she will. 

She grows, and becomes older, and when the-Lucina-that-she-is-not eventually marries and has children, and her father passes away in the time he ought to, she turns to her Aunt-who-is-not, and Lucina takes the hands of another generation with dark blue hair and shows them how to wield a sword, how to block and dodge and fight back. She sees that she, now, has scars on her palms. She has a finger missing, she has grey hair. She is the grizzled old general, grown up now at last.

Watching the child-that-is-and-isn’t-hers, she realises that it isn’t what she was supposed to have, and in many ways it wasn’t what she wanted, but what she has is better.


End file.
